The Band Perry’s Comeback Day Honors Resilience

On Monday (Aug. 1), the Band Perry celebrated its Comeback Day by releasing the new single “Comeback Kid,” sharing new details on an upcoming third album and by giving back in Nashville.

And fans were let in on the action live for 24 hours on Facebook.

Debuting new brunette locks, Kimberly Perry called the new Band Perry single “Comeback Kid,” “the most intensely personal lyric,” the Grammy-winning trio has ever written.

“It’s the real-life narrative of everything that we’ve been thinking and feeling over the past year,” she said. “It’s no secret to anybody that we’ve gone through an amazing transformation that ended in such a bright and beautiful place. But it had its moments along the way of real and true struggle.”

Kimberly admitted the new darker hair color scared her the first few times she saw herself in the mirror. At the start of the Facebook live stream, she mentioned she had been wearing blonde wigs in the last few public appearances to keep the darker look under wraps until she was ready for the big reveal.

“It took a few salon visits to get the right shade,” she said. “I went brunette because ‘Comeback Kid’ is all about solidarity and having each other’s back and sticking it out together. So I was like, ‘Either y’all are going to have to go platinum blonde or I’m going to have to go darker.’”

“I’m loving it,” she added. “Blondes do have more fun, but brunettes are more discrete.”

The new nude and white color scheme in the art for the new single has a story, too. “The unity in what we’re wearing,” Neil said, “the white and the nude colors, the visuals hold hands with the music and these colors show a sort of rebirth and that some things come back new again.”

The group added they want to be as transparent as possible with their fans as they continue into the next chapter of their career; hence the 24-hour Facebook live stream capturing all the Comeback Day events.

“We wanted to do a nonstop stream because it has been a minute,” Kimberly added. “It’s been a whole year since we’ve had a new song out and for our fans it’s all about celebrating together and giving them complete invasion into our world and giving us an invasion into their world.”

There’s also some sweet and victorious logic behind the ice cream and lemonade line in the song’s closing refrain.

“Talking about the Comeback Day and having your parade,” Kimberly said, “I felt like what would you have at a parade? You would have ice cream of some sort and lemonade.”

“The song is really in three different phases,” she added. “It starts out with extreme brokenness. By the time you get to the second verse, it’s more about resilience and starting to step back on your feet. From the bridge out, it’s just pure joy, triumph and celebration, ending the whole song with I’ll serve you ice cream and lemonade. It sort of says, ‘Look, I don’t know why everything happened in the way that it did, but I can look on the other side of it, we’re still cool. I’ll still serve you ice cream and lemonade.’”

A release date for the new collection is still up in the air, but they hope to have it out by the end of the year.

“I can tell you we are a couple of mixes away from getting ready to go,” Kimberly said. “We’ll see how quickly we can get ears on ‘Comeback Kid,’ get it up and running on its feet and the album will soon follow hopefully on this side of the holidays. But we’ll see what happens.”

One thing’s for sure. The next collection will not be titled Heart + Beat. “I will tell you this,” Kimberly said over the Facebook live stream, “Heart + Beat will likely and for surely not be the name of the new album. But it will live in our heartbeats forever.”

“Anybody who has gone through an amazing change in their life,” she added, “sometimes it’s about putting old things of the past in a box, and loving it, and looking at it from time to time, and also moving forward into the future.”

Wearing matching white, the siblings started the evening’s press conference with big check presentations representing two $25,000 donations to launch a million-dollar Teen Cancer America campaign to expand the Adolescent Young Adult Cancer program at the Monroe Carell Jr. Hospital at Vanderbilt. The group’s $25,000 share represented charity winnings from their recent appearance on ABC’s Celebrity Family Feud. First Citizens Bank matched the sum.

Playing new songs “Best One Yet” and “Stay in the Dark,” a live performance preview of selections from the new album wrapped the night. The Band Perry heads to Rio de Janeiro next for their first trip to the Olympic Games where “Live Forever” is the official song of Team U.S.A.